1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a novel method for producing high-quality bakery products such as bread within a short period of time, from various shaped bodies of dough that comprise flour of food grains such as wheat flour and rye flour.
2. Discussion of the Background Art
A conventional method of producing bakery products such as bread comprises adding water and other additives to wheat flour, further adding thereto baker's yeast and other expanding agents as a gas-generating source suitable to the intended products, then kneading them to produce dough, dividing the resulting dough, optionally after having permitted it to ferment or rise, into plural parts, each having a weight corresponding to the weight of each final product, suitably shaping them to produce shaped bodies of dough, subjecting them to final fermentation, and thereafter baking them to produce bakery products which are supplied to consumers.
The conventional method which is now generally employed on an industrial scale comprises the above time-consuming plural steps. Therefore, it is difficult to carry out this method several times a day in accordance with the real-time sales of products in shops or in accordance with the real-time orders for products from sellers. If the amount of equipment is increased in order satisfy the requirements for such real-time sales or orders, this will result in a decrease in the productivity of the equipment and an increase in equipment costs.
Recently, bakery products have been produced and distributed three times a day to 24-hour-open convenience stores and fast food stores in order to provide consumers with just-baked, high-quality bakery products. For this, if the conventional method of producing bakery products is used, it requires skilled bakery workers to work long hours, thereby making the labor conditions severe.
One effort that has heretofore been made for the controlled production of a variety of bakery products in small quantity is to divide the bakery process into two parts. A first part is carried out in a central factory and comprises kneading raw materials, subjecting the resulting dough to primary fermentation, dividing it into plural parts, shaping the parts into shaped bodies of dough, freezing them and storing the thus-shaped frozen bodies of dough. The second part is carried out in baking branch-factories (shops) and comprises, in accordance with real-time orders received several times a day, thawing the frozen bodies, subjecting them to final fermentation and thereafter baking them to produce final bakery products. In this case, however, the total time for the steps of thawing the frozen bodies of dough and subjecting them to final fermentation reaches several hours under the current thawing and fermenting conditions. Therefore, such a divided bakery process is still problematic in that an amount of thawed and fermented bodies of dough as can meet any unexpected excess demand for the products must be prepared every day and is often lost, and that the process could not smoothly meet an additional order for a small amount of products. Given this situation, it is now desired to drastically improve the conventional process of producing bakery products to shorten the time required for the process.
On the other hand, frozen dough is problematic in that the amount of gas to be derived from the yeast therein is reduced during storage, as a result of which it is often difficult to obtain products having a standard quality in the case where shaped frozen bodies of dough are subjected to a final fermentation after storage. In order to overcome this problem, measures to control the fermentation of the dough are generally taken in a step prior to shaping the dough into shaped bodies. However, such measures often interfere with the formation of the intrinsic components that participate in creating the delicious taste of bakery products, resulting in lower quality bakery products.